Planes, helicopters to join search operations at Sea of Okhotsk

VLADIVOSTOK, December 20 (Itar-Tass) —An An-74 plane and a Mi-8 helicopter of the Far Eastern rescue center of the Russian Emergencies Ministry left for the Sea of Okhotsk early on Tuesday to search for the missing crewmen from the Kolskaya oil rig.

Two Mi-8 helicopters are ready to fly at the Sakhalin village of Nogliki.

The Magadan ice-breaker, the Smith Sakhalin towing vessel and the Yuri Tarapunov dry cargo ship are working at the wreck site.

In the meantime, a group of psychologists of the Russian Emergencies Ministry left for Sakhalin to help the relatives and families of workers who went missing during the wreck of the Kolskaya oil rig in the Sea of Okhotsk, a spokesman for the Ministry’s Emergency Psychological Aid Center told Itar-Tass on Monday.

“A group of experts of the Emergency Psychological Aid Center left Moscow for Yuzhno-Sakhalinsk at 20:30 Moscow time. They have vast experience in dealing with emergency situations. They will join their colleagues from other regions in helping the relatives of the dead and missing oil rig workers,” the center’s spokesman said.

Psychologists working in the Sakhalin, Magadan and Murmansk regions are rendering individual psychological aid to the relatives and families of the dead and missing; they accompany them to meetings with representatives of a company that operated the Kolskaya oil rig and to the process of identification.

The Kolskaya oil rig registered in Murmansk port capsized and sank in the Sea of Okhotsk while being towed to the shore on December 18. Only 14 out of 67 people who were staying onboard at the time of the accident have been rescued. Another fourteen workers have died. Thirty-nine people are missing. Their fate is unknown.